Changing your MAC address on a Mac

This Tutorial is to explain how to change/spoof your mac address on a apple computer sporting leapord/snow leapord. Hope it helps :)

Retrieving your current MAC address
First, you’re going to want your current wireless MAC address so you can set it back without rebooting. Launch the Terminal and type the following command:

Code:

ifconfig en1 | grep ether

You’ll know see something like:

Code:

ether 00:12:cb:c6:24:e2

And the values after ‘ether’ makeup your current MAC address. Write this down somewhere so you don’t forget it. If you do, it’s not the end of the world, you’ll just have to reboot to reset it from a change.

Spoofing a MAC address
To spoof your MAC address, you simply set that value returned from ifconfig to another hex value in the format of aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

For this example, we will set our wireless MAC address to 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6 by issuing the following command:

Code:

sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6

The sudo command will require that you enter your root password to make the change.

Verifying the Spoofed MAC address worked
If you want to check that the spoof worked, type the same command as earlier:

Code:

ifconfig en1 | grep ether

Now you will see:

Code:

ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6

Meaning your MAC address is now the value you set it to. If you want to further verify the spoof, simply login to your wireless router and look at the ‘available devices’ (or attached devices) list, and your spoofed MAC address will be part of that list.

If you want to set your MAC address back to its real value, simply issue the above ifconfig commands with the MAC address that you retrieved in step 1. You can also reboot your Mac.

Enjoy!

Note for WiFi issues:
If you’re still having problems with MAC address spoofing in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the above method still works but try disassociating with any wireless network BUT keep your wireless Airport on (as mentioned above) – an easy way to do this is to type the following in the command line:

Code:

airport -z

Note that you have to have the ‘airport’ command setup to work for users, you can do that by copy and pasting this command into the Mac Terminal: